Plan B

14 October 2009 | Shelburne, NS

Beth / windy / 14C inside the cabin!

We have spent the last few days going round and round and round the possibilities for Plan A - sailing away from Nova Scotia and on to points south. (However much we love this province, it is not our preferred winter abode this year.) Our plans have had to do with timing and risk and destinations on "the other shore". We have finally had enough of that and have moved away from Plan A entirely.

At the end of my last posting, I said "Way will open." Well, way has opened and it is the Highway. After days and days of discouraging forecasts and plummeting temperatures, we started looking at the idea of shipping Madcap south and starting the sailing portion in the Chesapeake Bay.

Plan B sees us sail back to South Shore Marine near Chester, load the boat on a truck and send her off to Solomon's Island, Maryland. It is not all that wildly warm there either right now, but it's a whole lot closer to finding the heat. This plan will also get us to about where we would be at the end of October if we had been able to keep on going when we left on Oct 2.

I keep feeling apologetic about it, but as Jim reminds me, cruising is about weighing options and making the best decision for us. This is it. Is it an easier way out? You bet. More expensive too, but we'll find a way to compensate for that. At least this is something we've never tried before and it takes away the spectre of poor Madcap with ice and snow on her decks and her crew frozen in the cockpit.

Now we are looking at weather windows to go back up the coast and, once again, finding it challenging. How can that possibly be? The wind has been NW up to 25 knots today with wave height of 2 metres but it is scheduled to drop tonight. We plan a "before dawn" start on Thursday in an attempt to make Chester in one day, because Friday brings winds up to 45 and 50 knots, and the next few days after that are NE winds - exactly the direction we will be travelling.

Jim says, "We need to reboot this trip." We are not sure yet of the exact timing of this next adventure but we'll let you know how it evolves.

Beth and Jim have spent the last several winters sailing southern waters on s/v Madcap. They love Halifax in the summer, but plan to spend the winters exploring warmer places - currently the Guatemala, Belize, Honduras area.

Extra:

The Madcap crew left Ottawa in 2007 to go sailing in the Bahamas. After a highly successful year, they returned to Canada, settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in the fall of 2009 they left to do it again! Journey #3 (2010/11) took them back to the Bahamas and then on to Cuba for several weeks [...]

before laying the boat up in Fernandina Beach, FL for the summer.
For the 2011/12 season, they sailed down through the Florida Keys, across to Mexico and on to Belize and Guatemala. Madcap resided in the Rio Dulce under the care of Casey Brooks for the next few summers and they explored Guatemala and Belize during the winter of 2012/13, and the Bay Islands of Honduras in 2013/14. They were back onboard in January 2015 for another season in Rio Dulce and Belize. Madcap is spending the summer of 2015 at Tortugal Marina in Rio Dulce, Guatemala while Beth and Jim enjoy their land base in Nova Scotia.
They set off again in November 2015 for the 2015/16 season.
Contact info: Jim - captainmadcap@hotmail.com and Beth - madcapmum@hotmail.com